How did the Emancipation Proclamation affect the Civil War?

Despite its shocking casualty figures, the most important consequence of Antietam was off the field. From the outset of the war, slaves had been pouring into Federal camps seeking safety and freedom. Early in the war, Lincoln had slapped the wrists of commanders who tried to issue emancipation edicts in areas under their control. Trying to balance political and military necessity against moral imperatives, Lincoln believed that keeping the slave-owning border states—Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and particularly Kentucky—in the Union was critical and that making any move toward freeing slaves could incite those states to secede. Moreover, the Constitution protected slavery in several ways, most importantly through its defense of property rights. Finally, Lincoln believed for the first year or so of the war that a significant number of Unionists existed in the seceded states and that, given time, those people would rise up and revolt against the Confederate government.

As early as August 1861, though, slaveholders’ claims to property rights had begun to erode when Congress passed its First Confiscation Act, which allowed Union troops to seize rebels’ property, including slaves who fought with or worked for the Confederate military. One Union general, Benjamin Butler, a prominent attorney and politician in civilian life, read up on military law and used confiscation laws to the Union’s benefit by turning the slave owner’s claim to property rights on its head. Armies had always been able to confiscate property of military value, Butler argued, and slaves were instrumental in supporting the Confederate cause. With so many slaves manning factories and working fields, about 80 percent of eligible white Southern men wound up serving in the military. Butler declared slaves who came into his lines to be “contrabands” of war and therefore not liable for return to their masters. The name contrabands was used for the remainder of the war to describe slaves who ran from their masters to the Union army.

In April 1862 Congress abolished slavery in the District of Columbia and paid owners in the district about $300 on average for each slave. Three months later Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act, which mandated that any Confederate civilian or military official who did not surrender within 60 days would have his slaves freed. Two days after that, Congress banned slavery from the territories.

Lincoln, meanwhile, was meeting with men from the border states, especially Kentucky, hoping to persuade them to agree to a compensated emancipation. Over the course of these encounters, it became clear to him that the broad Unionist sentiment he thought existed in the South was a chimera. When talks with the Kentucky delegates broke off in July, Lincoln immediately sat down and drafted the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. In its final form, the Emancipation Proclamation would free the slaves in areas that were not under Union control as of January 1, 1863, when it went into effect. This meant it did not apply in the border states or places such as New Orleans, which were already under Union military occupation by that time. Lincoln realized that such a move would strike a serious blow militarily to the Confederates, who relied on bondsmen for the bulk of their labour during the war, by both demoralizing white Southerners and giving additional incentive to slaves to run away.

However, the summer of 1862 had been a bleak one for Federal forces, and Lincoln did not want to issue the proclamation when the North appeared to be losing. He did not want other countries to consider it an act of desperation. So he put the document in his desk drawer and waited for a victory. Antietam, while technically a draw, was close enough that Lincoln claimed it as a Union win and announced the proclamation. This was an important turning point. The war was now a contest not just about saving the Union but also about freeing four million bondsmen and bondswomen. This new moral element to the war persuaded the British and French to stay out of the conflict and to never offer the Confederates the diplomatic recognition they desperately sought.

Emancipation Proclamation, edict issued by U.S. Pres. Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, that freed the slaves of the Confederate states in rebellion against the Union.

Before the start of the American Civil War, many people and leaders of the North had been primarily concerned merely with stopping the extension of slavery into western territories that would eventually achieve statehood within the Union. With the secession of the Southern states and the consequent start of the Civil War, however, the continued tolerance of Southern slavery by Northerners seemed no longer to serve any constructive political purpose. Emancipation thus quickly changed from a distant possibility to an imminent and feasible eventuality. Lincoln had declared that he meant to save the Union as best he could—by preserving slavery, by destroying it, or by destroying part and preserving part. Just after the Battle of Antietam (September 17, 1862) he issued his proclamation calling on the revolted states to return to their allegiance before the next year, otherwise their slaves would be declared free men. No state returned, and the threatened declaration was issued on January 1, 1863.

Britannica Quiz

43 Questions About Politics (Mostly in the United States) Compiled from Britannica’s Quizzes

This quiz gathers together questions from Britannica’s quizzes about politics, law, and government. It includes a lot of questions about the United States, but look out for a few about Australia too.

As president, Lincoln could issue no such declaration; as commander in chief of the armies and navies of the United States he could issue directions only as to the territory within his lines; but the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to territory outside of his lines. It has therefore been debated whether the proclamation was in reality of any force. It may fairly be taken as an announcement of the policy that was to guide the army and as a declaration of freedom taking effect as the lines advanced. At all events, this was its exact effect.

Its international importance was far greater. The locking up of the world’s source of cotton supply had been a general calamity, and the Confederate government and people had steadily expected that the English and French governments would intervene in the war. The conversion of the struggle into a crusade against slavery made European intervention impossible.

The Emancipation Proclamation did more than lift the war to the level of a crusade for human freedom. It brought some substantial practical results, because it allowed the Union to recruit Black soldiers. To this invitation to join the army the Blacks responded in considerable numbers, nearly 180,000 of them enlisting during the remainder of the war. By August 26, 1863, Lincoln could report, in a letter to James C. Conkling, that “the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion.”

Two months before the war ended—in February 1865—Lincoln told portrait painter Francis B. Carpenter that the Emancipation Proclamation was “the central act of my administration, and the greatest event of the nineteenth century.” To Lincoln and to his countrymen it had become evident that the proclamation had dealt a deathblow to slavery in the United States, a fate that was officially sealed by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.

Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now